TRAC Updates Prosecutorial Discretion Stats

"During the first quarter of FY 2014, seven percent of all Immigration Court cases were closed due to the exercise of prosecutorial discretion (PD), according to the latest case-by-case records (through December 2013) obtained and analyzed by the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC). Originally announced in August 2011 as a program to clear cases from the accumulated court backlog, PD closures continue to be used in handling new Immigration Court cases. In fact, so far this year PD is being used much more frequently than during the first year of the PD program, FY 2012, when such closures accounted for only 4.7 percent of all cases closed.

Overall, PD has been used to close 6.6 percent of all cases since the program began. But in five courts, more than one in five cases is closed via PD: Seattle (29.8% PD closures), Tucson (26.0%), Los Angeles (23.7%), Omaha (23.1%) and Phoenix (20.7%).